Thought I'd use Sbooth's 'Max' app to bulk-covert a load of ALACs on my Mac to MP3. In total it was about 1,500 tracks.

"Leave it running overnight", says I to myself, "It'll be done in the morning"

So I left it running overnight. This morning I shook the mouse to wake the screen, expecting to see it all done and dusted.

Was it? No, it bloomin' well wasn't.

50 tracks in, or thereabouts, it had come across a track it couldn't convert for some bizarre reason, whereupon it had stopped dead, displayed some error-message in a pop-up box I didn't understand, then waited inanely for some monkey to click 'OK' before moving onto the next track. And no doubt it had sat like that for the best part of seven hours. :wall:

The programmer[s] who write these apps are immeasurably cleverer than me when it comes to computer programming, yet how come they think having it just grind to a halt with some lame 'there has been an error, click ok to continue' pop-up box is a good idea? If I was clever enough to write something like Max in the first place, right from the very first version I'd program it to log the errors in some list that the user can look at afterwards, and carry on. Not program it to sit there with some stupid f#####g pop-up message for seven solid hours! |(

Did the darn thing again during converting another batch. I was hovering around this time and I saw it, so it didn't get chance to sit there doing nothing for seven hours waiting for someone to press any key to continue, probably just a couple of minutes :roll:

Cheers I'll bare that in mind next time I do a bulk convert.I don't know what they're thinking. They must know that one main task their software will be used for is bulk-conversion, which will probably be unattended, seeing as it's not exactly an entertaining process to watch and it can take hours. You really do not want it stopping 50 or 60 tracks into 1,000+ waiting for someone to 'click ok to continue'.Twits.

Cheers I'll bare that in mind next time I do a bulk convert. I don't know what they're thinking. They must know that one main task their software will be used for is bulk-conversion, which will probably be unattended, seeing as it's not exactly an entertaining process to watch and it can take hours. You really do not want it stopping 50 or 60 tracks into 1,000+ waiting for someone to 'click ok to continue'. Twits.

Just a thought. Why use Max at all, why not do it all in iTunes? I have my main library in AIFF on an external drive converted the whole lot to aac 320 for my portable devices and saved that to the library on the iMac. I could have saved it to MP3 instead just by changing the settings in preferences.

Because iTunes is a major ball-ache for transcoding. First of all it doesn't intuitively support transcoding to a different location outside of your regular 'iTunes Media/Music/' folder. In this instance I have transcoded nearly 2,000 ALACs in my iTunes library to MP3s in another location, and iTunes won't natively do this without a lot of faffing-around. Then the final nail in the coffin is it insists adding all the transcoded copies to its library, so had I used iTunes I would have ended up with 2,000 duplicates in my library that I'd have to delete.